


Kore / Kouros

by coffeehousehaunt



Category: Lost Girl
Genre: Bo's origins, Darkfic, Fix-It, Forced Pregnancy, Implied/Referenced Incest, Mythology mayhem, Origins of the Fae, Other, POV: Persephone, Possession, Prose Poem, Reincarnation, The Blood King, The Blood Wars, The Dark Queen, The Death Train, myth!fic, sometimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-26
Updated: 2015-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-25 22:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3826765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeehousehaunt/pseuds/coffeehousehaunt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Persephone" isn't the only name she's gone by. Rainer isn't what the Blood King was scared of. Some things refuse to be written out of history. </p>
<p>Some things are too old.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kore / Kouros

**Author's Note:**

> Not remotely ship-oriented; pretty much exclusively my attempt to patch some of the holes in the mythology on this show. 
> 
> The myths used are bent as needed. Of course.

Something is coming. 

We stand on the brink; the tide pulls out. We stand on the brink; we hover. Bared sockets blinking in the sunlight, sticky sand gasping in the air. Somewhere, the wave gathers. 

The silence rings with rage. The crashing of water on stone whispers in the quiet. The glass-ridden sand, the red-tinged cliffs; draw breath. Tower. 

Here under the stars the skin of the earth peels back to reveal the bones, the skull of the heavens grinning back at itself. We begin again. 

We hold. 

***

But how did it all begin? 

There was a girl; but then, there were many girls. 

This one tasted like crushed flowers and the oil that flows down the mountains; down the ruin of Typhon and the giants. The place where morning glows to one side and Night shutters the heavens to the other. A twilight girl, a sunrise girl. 

You slipped between the pines and the olive trees, the poplars and the oak; the ash and the roses. They knew you by a stern name, destroyer of cities, death in one hand and fire in your mouth. But you came to me wild-eyed and black-haired; your perfect teeth in a gentle smile—you laid death aside, your fearsome helm, and came to me as yourself. 

I had been watching for you from the mountain; looking up when you came up from beneath. When you asked me to come back with you, your helm hiding the gentleness in your black eyes, hardening your voice— 

I knew you beneath it. Would know you even if I couldn't see you. 

There was a girl; but then, there were many girls. 

And I was promised to another; but I knew you. I knew you by your white smile. I took your hand, and we ran. We've been running ever since. 

There was a girl; but then, there were many girls. 

Somewhere the earth was all amber, and the sky—it stretched away, away. 

A woman appeared out of the desert, with her hair like ice at dawn; I had been chosen. By you. Your name a distant thing—a roll of thunder, never rain. She brought me to your city, to rule by your side. _Me_. 

There was a girl; but then, there were many girls. 

A hand; yours in mine. You took my hand, grinning, and we ran. We've been running ever since. 

There was a girl; but then, there were many girls.

But where did it all _begin_? 

Irrelevant. 

It began with us. 

**

Perhaps it was the first time; it was always the first time, and the last time, every time. 

There is only this: A hand, yours in mine. We carved our bodies from the trees; we congealed in the mud. We stumbled free, a new thing. Wordless, grinning, you reached for my hand, underneath dazzled stars and wobbly trees with their uncertain whispers. And we ran. Our eyes unfolded creation; our steps bounded the horizon; our footprints the shape of consciousness. 

Until you grew tired, and we had to stop. And finally, you left a mark on me, and left me altogether; alone, under the stars. 

I waited for you; you returned to me. An image of you I had never seen before. You, alive again. This was the first resurrection. 

Finally, I grew tired, and you knew—there was a girl. There were many girls. But you have never been able to refuse me anything, and since she was of your flesh, neither could she. And again, we ran; and we've been running ever since. 

You sought me out, again and again; again and again, I found you. I would see you in my reflection; you and I, immutable, inseparable. You and I, breathing the same air; you and I, one. You and I. Always and only. 

And then there was only us, and the chase: through the wood that spanned from one sea to the next, among the timid stars touching down, the trees as they awoke. We drank with the wolves, we sang with the birds, we swam beneath the waves. As they crawled out of the mud, as they fell from the sky, as they coalesced at the crossroads of the winds. 

There are a thousand names for us in every corner of the cosmos. There is no place our hands have not touched; no place we have not walked. Our breath disperses on the winds; our dust settles in the depths. We tangle in the tide; we wash up on the shore. We crawl back to each other. 

There is no part of mine that has not been yours; no part of you that is not mine.

And we run. In the sap under the bark, in the current under the wave, in the air in the lung—in the blood in their veins. It has always been us; in the blood they crave, in their blood that dies and renews, in the blood they swear on—the blood that binds them together. It was always us, love. Always you and I. In their blood. A world made in our image. 

They pray to us when they touch; their voices echo ours and their words descend from our tongues. They call upon our names, begging our favor to enter our dance; for the privilege of tasting our love, they drown—you and I, the waves dashing on the rocks. Over and over. 

And in their veins, we are mingled forever; their source, their essence. We gave our gifts to them, and the debt they owe us is paid when we reclaim our flesh, walk the earth again—the gods of our descendants. 

And thus, we lived. 

Until _he_ came. 

Until he found a way to bind us, not with chains, but with our very lives— 

With blood. 

He strained us from our own veins like impurities from wine; he cast us into the pit with no end. He buried our bodies far apart. He set about erasing all traces of us from the cosmos—setting himself up as a god in our place. To even whisper our names was death. 

Until we were forgotten. Until there was no sound of our names, no portal to cross over—no living blood to inhabit. A world he sought to carve in his image. 

The darkness of this place is a tiny thing compared to being bound to flesh, a single body, one half the whole; far removed from living blood, a beating heart other than yours and mine—To watch you disappear, drained into the abyss, is torment itself. 

But we survived, in the dark, in our prison on the edge of the great gap. 

And after an age had passed, one of them looked, a boy with eyes that saw too far. Beyond the image the usurper had set up of himself. And who else should be at his side but his daughter? 

And we knew; this is how we would loose ourselves from this prison. This is how we would find our revenge. 

What cannot be seen can still be heard; and we could not walk the earth, could not touch him—but you could whisper in his ear. Could show him the boiling seas of blood, the red wake of its self-appointed King, could fill his extraordinary dreams with every death before and every one to come, until he could not sleep for the voices screaming. For vengeance, retribution, payment exacted; the scales balanced. Until your rage descended on him and his own reflection belonged not to him, but to you. 

You waged war against the Blood King. He believed us trapped, without hope—you nearly destroyed him for it. In the end, though, he realized it was you, eclipsing even the body you inhabited, the consciousness that had not yet acknowledged you. 

He bound you in your new body, far away from me; far away from here. Left you little more than a memory in my arms; a shadow of rage and pain. Left me alone in the dark again as the stars went out. 

So I blighted his daughter with it; a love she no longer remembered, a loss she could not grasp. When she lashed out and incurred the wrath of her father's enemies, he actually gave her to them. 

I was someone's daughter, once; a beggar's, and a king's, and everything in between. They had the decency to grieve, though, when you came for me. 

A hundred years, two hundred, three hundred—I watched her survive his dungeons by the thinnest margin, stepping in when the margin grew too thin and she nearly finished us herself. The petty king was too enamored of his new toy, the punishment he had extracted from the Blood King. He took his time flaunting her. It suited my purposes well enough. 

When the stories spread of the haunted castle of the mad king, perhaps the Blood King was satisfied to let him rot for demanding the life of his daughter. Had he looked, he would have seen. But he did not so much as inquire into the matter. 

I spoke to Aife. She could not see my face, but she knew my voice. There was a river beneath the castle; the locks that held it back were strong, but she could hear my voice through the bars of her cell, the shaking of the stone, the roar of the water. I gave her hope, at times; instructions at others. I told her how to open the locks. I told her how to escape; how to kill the man who enslaved her, even though it would surely be suicide as the water rose. 

I lied. 

When the river beneath the palace flooded and drowned the entire castle, the list of people who wanted the king dead was too long to bother with—and his allies were among them, alienated by his madness. Someone was executed, blood was spilt according to the laws; Aife came to me, carried down the river, far below the earth. She washed up on the shore where Irkhalla touches the boundary of this pit and every river converges, freezing as it tumbles into the gap. I met her there in the flesh; we weren't the only things that had begun to decay, after so long. 

She nearly killed me, after so long on a leash. But she recognized my voice, and so she accepted food from me—pomegranate seeds. I had taken what was left of you and bound it up inside them. And she was a succubus; it was simple enough. Even simpler to prevent her from leaving. The cage was only necessary to keep her from attacking me. 

There were others; those who I spoke to, who kept the memory of us alive, however broken and disjointed. Who brought us sacrifices—girls, suitable bodies, even slaves. It must have been one of them, taking pity on her, who helped her escape. 

She used the river, and the gap—flooded the lowest levels of the prison and escaped. Extinguished the light we had kept burning for so long. Took the only piece of you I had left and fled with it. Left me in darkness. Thirty years is not so long, in a life like ours, but it was the nearest to hopelessness I have ever known. 

But Aife, I knew, would lead us straight to the child. And she did; a city, in the north. We couldn't locate her exactly, but it was enough. 

Our heralds have sometimes held banners, but this one was no less ours; your harbinger, my handmaiden, with her hair like ice at dawn. She delivered the girl to you—brought _me_ to you. We met there, in the flesh. You, insensate and lost, your body a hollow shell without his will, his memory; me, fighting every step of the way. An unbearable awakeness washing over us both, drowning in flesh, ill-fitting. 

And I fought. 

This was a cage, a prison. A coffin, hurtling through the void. The darkness crept in through the windows and the train rattled like a faltering heartbeat; the roof of my car caved in. And the iron bands looked like a collar, a chain etched with a name that's always been just beyond my understanding. My fate served on a platter; did you really think I'd just eat it up? 

You said you were waiting for me, and you looked as terrified and uncomprehending as I felt. And that was when I trusted you; no thrones, or conspiracies, but you and me, running this gauntlet together, into who knows what. A little spark in the middle of nothing. I recognized you, and the very image of the world rippled. I recognized us, coming on like the storm. Your name on my tongue. Defiant. 

Defiant; and senseless, like the streaks of oil you left all over my back, my sides, the gritty sweat on the side of your neck, your desperate pulse, while we sprinted just to survive, just to make it to the next stop, make it to—something. Our bodies twisting against the dark. My fingers touched the dust and made it live; the train gasped and shuddered around us in spite of the ice that gathered at the edges of the panes, the rust and the disintegrating panels. 

The lanterns, the candles, the boiler room—all of it burned like a fever, seeped into our skin until it took it on like a suntan, until our eyes looked like fired coal, brown and blue, and maybe that's where the coal lived. The sweat and the melting ice boiled off our skin all the same. We were never sure if the tracks were just invisible, or if we _were_ the tracks—if _we_ were the engine. Hard to know who the hallucination is—and in the end, it didn't matter. There's a difference between trying to do the right thing and _becoming_ the right thing, and whatever we were on that train—it goes all the way back. Like the place where the ends of the world meet. The two of us, fighting against the dark on that train—it was more than just the two of us. It was _everything_. The story that's played out since the clock started ticking in the first atom. 

I didn't recognize my own hands; you wore a mask, a visor as black as the void outside. You looked at me through burning coals and over a river of white-hot solder. But we were _there_ ; oil and dust, sweat and spark, flesh and void. I watched that butterfly flutter around that car for hours, that soft blue dust on my fingertips. And I recognized you; recognized _this_. I recognized you in my reflection, and the very image of the world rippled. I recognized us, coming on like the storm. Your name on my tongue. I didn't understand before; I've never been the solder that held something together. I've only just gotten people hot. But this was so much more than a cheap parlor trick like making some creepo spill his grossest fantasies. 

He tried to take it back—Trick did. His curse would have left me to wander the earth without you. But you can't; you can't go back to what you were before. Not when I saw you everywhere. Not when I heard you in my veins. Maybe your name was a mystery, but there was always the fever; I was on fire. Not knowing only made it worse; this nameless _wanting_ ringing in my bones. And when I remembered— 

How do you tell that to the people you knew before? How do you say that without sounding like a megalomaniac? But you can't erase it, can't undo it. 

And then I watched you die for me, and none of it mattered anymore. The rest was just titles and conspiracies and— 

Catastrophe. 

The boy's sacrifice was for nothing, it seemed—except the human would go to Freyja, ours of old; your harbinger, my handmaiden, with her hair like ice at dawn. 

So she came back—an image of you, returning to me. I gave her our light, to break the curse of the Blood King, to allow us to cross back over, and the others he had imprisoned here, in Tarterus; rivals, too mighty to kill, too strong to be subjugated. Too dangerous to be allowed to walk the earth. 

Our prison is opened. And she resists. Oh, yes. She resists. 

But in the end, she is of your flesh, and there is no part of you that is not mine.


End file.
